However, by activating an antinomian current of the Marranic tradition as a third element I aim to interrupt any synthesis between contexts often too easily integrated in the closed circuit of myth. The serendipitous conjunction of the latter two contexts manifests a dialectical encounter first staged between Finnegans Wake and Neolithic archaeology in north-west Europe ( Crook 2004). This is the constellation formed between an episode in Ulysses involving Leopold Bloom’s epiphanic vision of Aldebaran, the brightest star of the constellation of Taurus, and the orientation of the Carregal do Sal cluster of Neolithic dolmens upon the same star.
95), is the ultimate source for antinomian perspectives introduced to the configuration central to this study. With a strong resonance in the Iberian context, the ‘hidden faith’ of the Marranos, the Sephardic Jewry who were converted by force to Christianity ( Scholem 1971, p. 95) of the Marrano phenomenon to explore parallels between modalities of revelation at play in James Joyce’s novels, Ulysses ( Joyce 1922) and Finnegans Wake ( Joyce 1939), and that implicit in an archaeoastronomical interpretation of a group of Neolithic dolmens dating to around 4000 BC in the Mondego valley of central Portugal ( Silva 2013, 2015). In this paper I draw upon the ‘deeply paradoxical religious sensibility’ ( Scholem 1971, p. Within allegorised readings of archaeology and an archaeologicised reading of Joyce’s texts I bring into play non-synchronous elements which both disrupt the idealised harmonies of social and religious conformity and illuminate hitherto unseen connections between diverse, seemingly incommensurable contexts, beyond the discursive conventions of detached objectivity, without relinquishing irreduceible remnants to a totalising synthesis. Applying a cryptotheologically-inflected exegesis immanent to the materials of text and archaeology in the light of their respective orientation to the same astral phenomenon, I seek to generate insights unanticipated within interpretations restricted to the disciplinary boundaries, theories and methodologies of archaeology and literary criticism as discrete entities. The character of the reciprocal relationship between megalithism in Neolithic Portugal and the writings of the twentieth-century author, James Joyce, is transfigured through the introduction of a third element of interpretation, a deeply paradoxical current of Jewish thought, with messianic dimensions, antithetical to the forces of mythic reconciliation present in Joyce’s fiction and in archaeological conceptions of ‘symbolic systems’ in antiquity, which tend to erase the innumerable singulars of experience. This paper proceeds from the concurrent interpretation of two distinct, apparently unrelated disciplinary contexts, at the crossroads of the positivism of archaeology and the imaginary world of literature.
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